Is this the best classical music app yet? Stephen Hough delves deep into Liszt's Sonata

Touch Press and Stephen Hough team up for a groundbreaking musical experience

I recall a number of years ago seeing a teenager on a dancing game in a seaside arcade. As coloured lines and spots hurtled down a screen towards him at a startling rate, he moved his hands and feet accordingly with scarily skilful and energetic accuracy. Well, now you can imagine one of our finest pianists, Stephen Hough, doing that very thing. After a fashion. Seated at a Steinway. Playing Liszt. But still, it’s probably the closest you’ll ever get to see him playing at the end of the pier.

The feature is part of the impressive new app from Touch Press, in which Hough performs, explores and explains Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor, arguably the most epic masterpiece among Romantic piano sonatas. Touch Press has form here – you may recall their recent app devoted to Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 (see my recent blog), or their Orchestra app. This latest release, however, has the intensive focus of the first of their cultural apps, that dedicated to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, more so in fact. As Touch Press puts it: ‘users are invited to experience a single piece through the mind and fingers of a single performer.’